Already grieving from the knowledge that her baby would be born dead, Arlette Lyons, a 34-year-old sales representative from Dublin and her husband were stunned to find they would have to take a plane to England to end her pregnancy.

"Thinking of my other two children, the family, my baby, to carry on for another 28 weeks was inconceivable. I would have had to lock myself away, telling the kids would have been horrific, so carrying on with the baby never was going to be an option for us.

"We had the termination in March and I suppose I couldn't believe that we had to leave our friends and family, and the treatment in our own maternity hospital was so fabulous, to leave all that support from everybody behind who were looked after us, I was just horrified.

"The world needs to know that this is happening in Ireland in 2012 and it has to stop."

Ruth Bowie, a 34-year-old paediatric nurse living in Dublin, got pregnant in 2009 shortly after she married. Her 12-week scan detected that a large portion of the baby's skull and brain was missing and that it would ultimately not survive. Thirteen weeks into her pregnancy Ruth and her husband flew to Birmingham for the termination.

"Because our flight [home] wasn't until 7 o'clock that night we had nowhere to go [afterwards] so we wandered the streets of Birmingham for about four or five hours. At one point we considered going to the cinema because it was quiet and dark but in the end we didn't. We just walked around the centre of Birmingham and pottered about. I was in pain, I was bleeding and we had just lost our baby and all you wanted to do was go home to your own bed, and have your family and friends around you but that was not possible."

Amanda Mellet, 36 and originally from Michigan, learned 11 weeks into her pregnancy that there was something profoundly wrong with her baby's heart. On her husband's birthday the couple were told by the hospital there wasn't even any point in seeing a heart specialist about defects in the baby girl's heart given that if Amanda had gone full term the child would die. They travelled to England for a termination.

"I remember one of the midwives over there saying to me 'You are doing the best thing for your baby.' It was the first time that anyone from the medical profession had said that to me. And it dawned on me: 'Jesus do I have to leave the country to get support because everyone in Ireland is so afraid to say anything?'

"I don't believe that they don't care, it's just that people are so afraid of giving an opinion or seem to give an opinion."